


deserter

by brophigenia



Series: that boy is a monster [6]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Mentions of Past Amputation, Mentions of Past Nongraphic Child Death, Mentions of Stormtrooper Program, Nongraphic Prosthetic Removal, Phasma Redemption, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, past major character death, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 09:10:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11101416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: I thinkI lost my halo.





	deserter

**Author's Note:**

> Well, guys, here we are at the end. Let me know how you like it. If you have ideas for my next story/series, hit me up in the comments. Warnings for mentions of past First Order Stormtrooper Program tactics, and for Phasma's PTSD.

_your sword’s grown old and rusted_  
_burnt beneath the rising sun;_  
_it’s locked up like a trophy,_  
_forgetting all the things it’s done_

She sees the end coming from far off; probably even before she lays on her back and waits to die in a trash compactor, her left arm crushed irreparably beneath her.

She lies in wait for her opportunity. She knows how deep she’s in; how far she’s gone. She stares her failures in the face every day when she trains the squadrons. The FN unit is the worst; they look at her with wonder, sometimes, as if they can’t believe that this is their life. She doesn’t acknowledge their wide-eyed, budding individualism except to send them to reconditioning.

She watches her General die via comms. Her flesh and blood hand curls into a fist and she tries to suppress the images that rise up in her mind of a tiny body and a tar pit. She tries not to remember what he looked like as a child, sharp-cheekboned and scapula jutting like broken glass, harsh angles beneath the back of his threadbare sweater. The Force-sensitive from that backwater desert planet stabs him and he dies and she thinks the worst part of it all is that he dies so _normally._ He lived as a god, with the power to decimate entire star systems, and he died on his back in a dark room with no witnesses but a couple of old-world mystic relics.

She knows then that it’s time to go.

In the confusion, it is easy enough to commandeer an X-Wing. She has had a bag of supplies ready for weeks, waiting hidden inside one of her pillowcases and concealed beneath her sheets. She retrieves it and goes to the other end of the officers’ quarters sector. It’s easy enough to break into the General’s quarters with a well-placed blaster shot. She’s a far better shot now than she was at fifteen.

She goes through his drawers and tries not to feel guilty about it. She finds a stash of credits in the bottom one, tucked into an expensive-looking Rancor leather wallet. She turns to go and that’s when the cat comes out from beneath the bed.

Millicent. The General’s only real personal connection-- she’d walked in on him once cooing to the thing, holding it tight to his chest regardless of its shedding ginger fur.

She looks it in the eyes; it’s an affectionate thing, and after staring at her with wide yellow eyes for a few seconds it winds its way around her legs, purring and rubbing against her calves. _Faithless thing,_ she thinks, almost unwillingly fond, and before she consciously decides to do it, she scoops up the cat and tucks it into her jacket, dark and civilian. On her way out, she grabs a scarf from the back of the desk chair to wind around her head. It smells like flowers; it reminds her of funerals.

The planets are a blur; she never stays at one long enough to catch its name. She’s trying to become a ghost, after all, and ghosts float on the wind. They don’t take root in the ground to grow. She should know-- her ghosts move too quickly to grasp onto, no matter how much she might want to.

The First Order falls apart quickly; everywhere she goes, there are new tales of the Resistance’s triumphs. The barflies call Kylo Ren a double agent-- they say he worked for the Light all along. They are all ready to throw off the moniker _Jedikiller_ and instead call him _the last of the_ true _Jedi._

She wants to laugh every time she hears it and barely restrains herself from doing so. She's afraid if she starts she won't be able to stop.

Millicent grows leaner and so does she; she calls herself _Nissa_ after her probable-mother and people look at her with curiosity and suspicion before she rids herself of the prosthetic chromium arm that the General had presented her with after the disaster at Starkiller Base.

(She feels like a different person without it on; she does not feel like Captain Phasma of the First Order.)

She tells herself at first that it’s the only practical decision to make; the arm’s neurolink, a flat piece of gel-like plastic fitted stickily to the nape of her neck, requires recalibration by a trained droid at regular intervals. Failure to keep up with it would just cause her harm in the future. She unstraps and unclasps it and buries it in a hole she’d pre-dug in the sparse woods of the port planet she was currently biding her time upon. Her right side feels lighter, and she keeps the stump wrapped up with a band because she doesn’t like the feeling of the air on the scar tissue. She kicks the displaced dirt back into the hole and watches it slowly cover up the menacing glint of the metal and the lurid red spokes of the now-defunct regime’s symbol.

After that, she’s just a haunted-eyed young woman with scars on her face and only one arm. People are more sympathetic to the picture she paints; she imagines that their minds weave her backstories that are much less wieldy than the truth. She plays the quiet, traumatized, _cautious_ refugee because it’s an easy role for her. She realizes the reason for this is that it’s not that far from the truth-- she’s fleeing, she has no home, she closes her eyes to sleep and sees all the death and suffering she’s responsible for and she wakes up shaking in a cold sweat, sick to her stomach with grief.

After ten standard months or so of running, she settles on a planet in the outer reaches of nowhere. It’s an agrarian society, one full of hermetic farmers living on its far-flung fringes. The soil is rich and thick and hearty, and when she picks up a fistful of it and brings it to her face it smells so _alive_ that tears spring to her eyes. She hasn’t cried since she was a child, since Ama was alive.

It’s not easy, planting and harvesting fields by herself. The replacement arm she buys the second season with the leftover funds from selling her surplus is rudimentary, its neurolink barely sensitive enough to allow her to place seeds in the ground. The days are long and the nights lonesome; she has grown too used to being surrounded by hundreds of people who look to her for answers and instructions.

Millicent helps; she becomes quite the mouse and rabbit catcher, defending their non-root vegetables from vermin. After they’ve been there for four seasons, nearly two standard years, a black tomcat starts to lurk about the property. Milli’s kittens are numerous and soft-furred with every conceivable combination of black and ginger fur and green and yellow eyes.

After they are weaned and Millicent grows disinterested in their pawing, Phasma puts them all into the big basket she usually uses to carry potatoes to the house and walks them into town, wide-brimmed hat shielding her face from the sun.

The children look up at her with wide eyes and gap-toothed grins and they beg their parents to be allowed to take home a kitten of their very own. Phasma speaks low and seriously about their pedigree for crop-defending, only the tiniest hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. The first child given permission to choose one of the black-and-ginger kits throws her arms around Phasma’s legs and lisps _thank you miz Nissa_ and she can’t help but set her hand very gently on the tiny thing’s silky blonde hair, throat tight and aching with long-held emotion.

She doesn’t deserve any of it, but somehow she’s got a life. Back at home, Milli lays languorously curled up with her dark suitor, the imaginatively named _Cat_ , and there is no work to do beyond weeding the half of the turnip bed she didn’t finish the day before. There is a blaster hidden beneath her mattress and affixed to the underside of the tiny kitchen table with plastisteel adhesive tape, a vibroblade in the tool shed and a bowcaster in the root cellar. Her skin gets darker with every season spent in the sunlight, and her hair has grown long enough to bundle at the back of her neck with a leather cord.

Phasma breathes, and breathes, and breathes.


End file.
